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Riggs condemned the protesters as "reckless, wanton lawbreakers." It recalled the Chinese president saying order must take precedence over human rights.

Consider another American politician and how she reacted to environmental protesters chained to stumps in her office.

Last year Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her staff called the San Francisco police to her office, and the cops cut the chains of the save-the-redwoods protesters with a grinder. She was outraged and wanted them out, but she didn't want them hurt.

On Friday, Feinstein wrote a powerful letter of protest to Humboldt County Sheriff Dennis Lewis about his deputies' actions in Riggs' office.

"I believe the use of pepper spray in a situation where it appears the demonstrators posed no threat of injury is unwarranted and unnecessary," she wrote.

There are people of honor and humanity in our government, whatever you think of their positions on China or old-growth redwood forests.

I'd hate to see Feinstein's reaction if she caught a cop in her office rubbing the painful essence of hot peppers in teenage girls' eyes.

"It was one of the hardest things I've ever done, being outside and knowing they were being pepper-sprayed in there," said Earth First's Josh Brown, who was outside Riggs' office during the Oct. 16 protest.

"We just held hands and sang so they could hear us. When they came out with their faces red and swollen shut, it was hard."

"It's un-American," said Celia Alario, a field organizer for protests to save old-growth redwoods in the Headwaters Forest in Humboldt County. "We live in a country where we are blessed by our forefathers with not only the right, but the responsibility, to stand up for what we believe."

Or, as the case may be, to sit down and chain themselves to a stump for what they believe. They believe in saving 60,000 acres of old-growth redwoods instead of the 7,500 acres the feds and state have negotiated to buy from the Pacific Lumber Co.

Whatever you think of young people chaining themselves to stumps in offices, you have to admit they're in no position to pose a threat or run away, the only acceptable reasons for a cop to use pepper spray.

By the way, the stump in Riggs' office was Douglas fir from a Pacific Lumber clear-cut. There are a lot of stumps in Riggs' district.

"I haven't been pepper-sprayed myself," said John Bowling, a Humboldt protester who works for the publication Ecotopia News. "But if I am, I don't know what will happen, because I have asthma."

Last week, a San Rafael man with asthma was pepper-sprayed by police and died.

Pepper spray has been applied to protesters' faces and eyes by deputies during two previous protests in Humboldt, according to protesters and their lawyers, who have filed a federal civil rights suit against Humboldt County authorities.

Chemical warfare directly into mucous membranes is just part of what activists face in Humboldt. If you've ever made fun of "tree-huggers" as impractical dreamers, you don't know how hard the authorities in Humboldt County make it to hug a tree, or a stump.

The save-the-redwoods protesters say they take about six hours of training in Gandhian tactics of nonviolence.

"If you can't do it, you can work in the kitchen, or we ask you to leave," said Alario.

They even have invited the police to join in the training, but, according to Bowling, only two officers from the small town of Arcata responded.

Then the protesters do all kinds of things you may find extreme, like sitting high in trees or chaining themselves to a lumber company gate. Sometimes they just stand by a public roadside.

Deputies have dragged them from the trees, pulled their chains tight, or put them in "pain-compliance" holds.

Sometimes their protests on public roadsides are declared "unlawful assemblies," and they're hauled off to jail. Then I guess it's time to become a Constitution-hugger.

"Destruction of the forest hasn't come without the destruction of civil liberties," is the way Bowling put it.

No, Humboldt County isn't Tiananmen Square. Pepper spray is not automatic weapons fire. This is America, after all.

We're so advanced in civil liberties and human rights we can tell other countries what to do - and hope they're not watching what we do on television.&lt;

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